


Not Found in the Official Record

by florahart



Category: The Martian - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 16:33:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6573745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/florahart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beck is a slob.  Watney is grateful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Found in the Official Record

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarsGarters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarsGarters/gifts).



> It's Watney. First person stream of consciousness style storytelling is his jam.

So, okay. This is embarrassing but whatever. I guess it’s a fair question. This is, like, not a real medical exam, right? Like, you’re not putting all this in my file? Okay. Let’s see. Where to start. All right.

Maybe I didn’t put everything in the official record, mostly because even though I agreed to the biometrics and various intrusive measurements every five minutes while I was on Mars, no one needs to have details about my actual shit schedule ongoing. Like, come on. You know it was one thing while there were a bunch of us, and we were all being measured because gathering the data of several people allows for interpretation, but just me? Not really all that much to be learned because my scenario is one no sane person would attempt to recreate.

Side note: if they do, I will personally come kick their ass constantly and repeatedly until they realize they are, in fact, wrong. Seriously.

Anyway, everything that first week or so, like, I recorded stuff like my temperature and fluid and food intake and output because there are known relationships there regarding infection and inflammation, right? I’m not a doctor but I know that much, and I was pretty sure I felt shitty enough to need the computer to help me figure out what to do if I developed a big infection. Besides die, I mean. But I didn’t keep it up once it was pretty clear I was _not_ going to die of antenna-spike gangrene, and especially once I moved into the phase in which I was goddamn depressed because I was totally going to die of one of the other many death-inducing features of Mars. Sure, I got over myself eventually and let the computer track a lot. Understanding how a man starves to death on Mars versus Earth would probably get someone a grant someday, and I’d be a footnote to the greater cause of medical knowledge. But there was a period… okay, let me just, just given me a minute. Like I said, this is embarrassing.

Is it loud in here? You know, the white noise, general ambience, whatever? No, just me? I dunno, I'm all wonky for sound ever since... everything. Nothing seems like the right volume at all, ever, so it's probably just me. But it seems loud, like there's--is there an oxygen leak? No, there would be alarms going off. _Hermes_ has alarms, there would be alarms, I'm fine, shit, where were we. Okay. Embarrassing reasons why I wasn't monitoring myself. Right.

So between the time when I didn’t die of the gangrene and the time when I got over myself, there was a good chunk of time where I was depressed and desperate and nowhere near ready to be productive, but I mean, there was only so much I could do amuse myself, okay? Like, I could sleep, and I could watch whatever anyone had in their entertainment stash, and I wasn’t ready to give it all up and dance to the disco music under the so very fucking many stars yet. And, I could jerk off.

Hey, I am a goddamn astronaut. Top condition, so once I didn’t die, I figured I might as well enjoy the time I had left. Yeah, sure, I started working on options, because science is how I got to Mars in the first place and it was kind of a habit, right? But at first, anyway, I wasn’t up to a ton of strenuous physical labor yet, so—oh, fuck you, orgasms are only strenuous for a minute, and besides they’re a pretty good way to go, right? So I went looking for porn or a reasonable facsimile. Obviously. I mean, I have a pretty good imagination (I submit for evidence: I imagined I could goddamn potato farm on Mars and get out alive), but if I was going to rub one out a couple or maybe okay maybe four or five times a day or some other maximum value short of chafing because holy shit there is only so much sound of one’s own voice one can take and even that much requires some getting used to, I needed material, and it’s not like I actually brought anything really useful for this because the plan involved us being on the surface _while being continuously monitored_ for a matter of weeks, not years. In a habitat with a bunch of other people. Who probably were all also not planning to self-abuse a bunch because, see: continuous monitoring.

So the pickings were slim. But, thank fuck, you’re kind of a slob.

Yes, it’s relevant.

Because you left your laundry out. Everyone else, everything went in the refreshing unit basically immediately. Socks, underwear, hell, I think Lewis actually ran her sheets through the thing three times a week because her sheets and pillow smelled completely neutral.

What, yes, I went around smelling people’s pillows. Shut up. Johannsens’s were pretty clean, too. Vogel’s, I don’t know how he managed to have extra-starchy sheets on goddamn Mars, but there it is.

You, though. I thought about it and realized you went into and out of the shower in a towel pretty much every time, changed by your bed. And you left everything in a pile. Yeah, I know whatever, seems inefficient to clean everything immediately when you could do it all once, _at_ once, and obviously it’s not like you were going to run back into the Hab to grab your laundry before blasting the hell off. Still, the upshot was, when I was nuts with boredom, tired of my own voice and smells and ideas, and oh my _god_ after the first little while, once the great botany experiment started, tired of the awesome smell of my own shit because hey it’s not like I didn’t need to keep it all right there on the damn floor to make the potatoes do their thing, I found your pile of sweaty socks and underwear available for my use. And like I said, I was using everyone’s stuff for two things: not smelling my own shit, which I eventually got used to but it took a while, and, jerking off.

Turns out, sweaty underwear worked pretty well for my purposes, so even though it makes you a fucking weirdo to be parading around the small apartment made of tents on a foreign planet in a towel, who _does_ that, I'm goddamn grateful for you, you weirdo. Eternally. I mean, pretending someone else might ever, say, touch my dick again, for example, went a lot better when I was smelling the appropriate smells, you know? So, hey, I bagged them up. Shut up _again_ , it was scientifically sound. Kept them on hand for private moments. …Yeah, as opposed to the ton of public moments I was experiencing at the time. But like, I saved that smell _up_. Reward for good behavior, good ideas, hard work, successfully establishing contact with NASA… Yeah, the day that first message came back, I cheered, ate slightly more than usual because god _damn_ celebrating is hard work, and grabbed my Ziploc full of Beck smells for a good hard enthusiastic round of fucking my hand until I shot all over my belly. I recaptured some of the calories by imagining it was you licking my fingers clean, so there, good science, good sense, healthy libido. All good. 

Fuck my life that the end result of this is you guys came back for me and I’m still a goddamn train wreck of emotional and psychological landmines, and I get hard every time I get a whiff of you in any way. I get hard, I make damp spots all over my clothes and sheets and whatever else is on hand, and if anything it’s getting worse because now it happens when you smell, I don’t know, clean. Like now. 

And yes. I know. I probably burned a couple hundred potatoes’ worth of calories specifically on the activity of getting my rocks off, and probably that could have made the difference, but fuck it, I also burned a lot of potatoes’ worth digging a reactor out of the ground, and rearranging battery chargers, and dragging literal rocks around the surface and every other kind of hard labor ever, so I refuse-- _refuse_ \--to feel bad about one single drop of semen expendi… wait. What?

What kind of question is that?

Yes, I _did_ think thoughts and tell myself stories while I was whacking it. Like, I have a brain in there, and I’m pretty sure I already mentioned an imagination. What, you figured I was holding hard onto a blank-ass picture of a plain white wall or something? If it’d been a common laundry bag or something, and we didn’t all write our names in our underwear because NASA and summer camp are basically the same thing, maybe I’d have just gone all free-rein and let my brain come up with a composite perfect partner or something, but shit, it’s not like I didn’t know they were _your_ shorts, so now, thank you very much brain, I have this whole list of Beck expressions and scenarios burned into the insides of my eyelids for quiet moments alone, and, apparently humiliating moments with you.

What _kinds_ of scenarios? Seriously, this seems like something you need to know? You’re not my shrink, even if you are kind of the closest thing we have for another couple hundred days but who’s counting, and I don’t even know if I would tell my shrink about the extent to which I let myself fixate on your dick. I’m sure it’s a nice dick. It’s nice in my head anyway, and I’ve seen you shower, and Jesus now I’m being creepy again. Losing all society for a million days in a row fucks a guy up. God.

And you still wanna know what kind of scenarios.

Fine.

There was the one where you were on your knees, eyes closed, worshiping the hell out of my balls with your tongue while I unloaded in your hair. There was the one where you bent me over the exam table and kept a couple fingers in me while you humped against my hip and breathed in my ear. There was the one where you laid me out on my back and fucked me while you held my hands at my sides and didn’t let me touch (uh, have I mentioned that among the supplies we _did_ have were a couple of pretty great kinds of medical-grade lube and a variety of interestingly-shaped tools and objects? And I had plenty of time to rig up a way… anyway). There was the one where you blew me in the shower. There was the pretty run of the mill one where I fucked you into the mattress—again: lube, tools, I’m a creative guy. There was the one where you gagged me with, conveniently, your underwear and… Wait, are you _writing all this down_? I mean, telling you is one thing, but I thought we were going off the record here. I don’t really know if I’m comfortable with… that’s, that’s your personal tablet. You’re making a list.

Um. Your list is longer than …against a wall? In the… okay I guess that’s possible but it seems kind of complicated but, like, am I now making up porn for _you_? Because I guess that’s fair, but is that what’s happening here? Knowing this is not going to make me less likely to pop a boner every time you walk by. Jesus, Beck, maybe you wanna not just lean over and check? I’m hard. I promise. It’s kind of, okay, it’s funny but it’s kind of …not? But you can just leave me to my thoughts. I’m sure eventually I will come up with a way to stop being all Pavlovian about the smell of your damn shorts.

What? Oh, you think we can do better than porn? Wait. Better than porn by… okay.

Wait, you’re making up a whole checklist?

And the start of a timeline.

From here to Earth.

Which we can record as legitimate and probably even weight-bearing exercise.

…I thought you and Johannsen… No, no, that’s not really a deal-breaker for me. I am not sure I _have_ any deal-breakers on this front. Except air-restriction. Not sexy. Seriously no.

Water? Yeah, I like water. And weightlessness. Zero-G fucking oh Christ that means you want to tie me to things. Which I am okay with but like, what do you even mean by... Good lord, your list is actually a _lot_ more comprehensive than mine. 

You know, even when I was completely sick of my own voice, I wasn’t ever all that speechless about anything. Even when I got a message back for the first time. Never really at a loss for words. And yet, here I am in fairly normal circumstances, or I guess as normal as I can be considering the whole hundreds of days in space thing, and I got nothing.

No, shit, don't _leave_. I'm not upset, or at least, not at you. I guess in the abstract I'm a little upset to learn that maybe during the very long goddamn time it takes to get to Mars in the first place we could have been entertaining one another because I'm pretty sure that would have been awesome, but better late than never.

In case this is not clear, I’m in. I’m extremely in. I’m very in.

Unless this is all a feature of anoxic hallucinations brought on by our insane nose-cone-less liftoff and free-float through non-earth-adjacent space. Not sure how I’ll be able to tell, so I’ll assume actuality until and unless I die.

Although if at some point the rest of the crew joins the shenanigans, I guess that might give it away. Or mean space madness is a thing, which I probably prove all by myself so yes, assuming reality until death. Good.

So, where should we start?


End file.
